Out of curiously, I recently grabbed a (Word 2003) test document I'd
posted to
the Buzz, and I opened it on a friend's computer with
OpenOffice.org (1.1.4) Writer. While the ink annotations and ink writing did look grainy in the open source word processor, it wasn't difficult to read, and everything was in the right place. A few days later, I decided to install OOo 2.0 on my Tablet and play some more. The MS Office ink was treated like graphics by Writer; I was able to delete, resize and move the ink objects as well as the highlighting I'd stuck in for good measure.
Naturally, once I'd made changes to the document in Writer and saved them, Word no longer saw the inked text as anything other than graphics. In addition, the highlighting I'd done now obscured the text underneath.
The way I see it, whether or not everyone you know can shell out the dough for MS Office 2003 should not be a factor in your decision to own and use a TabletPC. Perhaps knowing that a free office suite that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD can read what you write will hopefully make any tough decisions easier.*
*I haven't verified that the results are the same on all these operating systems, but give me time (at least for everything but the Mac; I find the prospect of dealing with XPostFacto to get OSX running on my beige G3 to be too troublesome; one day I'll just get another Mac, if people on eBay will stop outbidding me).